Intel Arrandale Benchmarks Revealed

Apple hasn’t announced new MacBook Pros yet, but the Arrandale processor presumed to be included in them just got a chance to rev their engines for the press.

MacRumors is reporting that the embargo is up for news and reviews on Intel’s latest Arrandale mobile processors. As previously reported, Arrandale is the 32-nm die shrink of the former Nehalem processors, and will be the first of their type to be usable in laptops such as the MacBook Pro.

Of course, there have been unconfirmed rumblings of late that Apple may skip this generation of chips entirely. Arrandale offers improved integrated graphics on the same processor, which still make them the best option to upgrade the MacBook Pro at this time.Anandtech has an overview of the newly announced chips, clocking in as fast as 2.66 GHz Dual Core as a base speed with Turbo speeds as high as 3.3 GHz. The chart above demonstrates notable improvements in clock speed, even with a direct comparison of the 2.53 GHz Arrandale alongside the 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo currently in use by the MacBook Pro.

Anandtech also found the battery life to be on par with the current Core 2 Duos: “From the balanced notebook perspective, Arrandale is awesome. Battery life doesn't improve, but performance goes up tremendously. The end result is better performance for hopefully the same power consumption. If you're stuck with an aging laptop it's worth the wait. If you can wait even longer we expect to see a second rev of Arrandale silicon towards the middle of the year with better power characteristics.”

Also notable is the impressive performance advantage that Arrandale brings for video and media creators thanks to the integrated graphics, particularly with x264 HD encoding.